A Pussy Post

"Cats aren't meant to eat crumpets."
- Wendy Juniper

Pussy Galore: "My name is Pussy Galore."
James Bond: "I must be dreaming."

"Not all cats are skinny little dancers."
- Kim

"I'll soon be kissing your sweet little pussycat lips."
- Tom Jones

"I like some cats."
- Rob

“Jean is a nice person who happens to like girls instead of boys. Some people like dogs instead of cats. Personally, I’d rather live with a lesbian than a cat.”
- Sophia, The Golden Girls

Shh. Listen.

I love it when one of the Overheard sites posts something I submitted.

I eavesdrop whenever I possibly can.

In some odd way it connects me.






"Fireworks and heat, someday.
Hold a shell, a stick, or play.
Overheard a lark today."
- Syd Barrett

Shalt Not

I don't remember where I was going with this.


But I'm pretty sure I can still take you there.



He, like many, had been restricted by his heredity and environment. He was raised small and there he remained. He made no informed conscious choice to hate what he hated. He reviewed no facts to conclude what he thought. He saw no alternatives, no options, no other ways. All he knew was within the parameters of his family's misinformation and ignorance.

I never felt he was mean. I never thought his heart held the hate his inherited beliefs did. I wanted to think he'd realize. That he'd wake up one morning and see clearly.

I spent a great deal of time on that piece of Earth, accepting the obligation for knowing better and trying to do the best I could. But his frame of reference was so narrow and brainwashed that I wound up drowning in his judgments.

He lived the life his parents wanted. He married and bred and worked and worshipped all in accordance to peer pressure. He surrendered his dream. He abandoned the only man he ever loved. And when it all fell apart, all those people he bent over backwards to please, bent over backwards to ostracize him.

Days like this I wish I hadn't been so good at walking away.


“To hell with you and all your friends.”
- The Bravery

Salted

He’s all too accessible and elusive.
Cryptic in his open pretend.

He shows me over and over that I will never be inner circle.
Not again.

I will never know him.
Not again.

And he has completely forgotten that I ever did.

In the all too familiar.
In the memories he doesn’t have.
In the memories I can’t shake.

I don’t want to miss anything.
I've already missed everything.

But in the end, I didn’t miss a thing, did I.
Not one thing.

It’s so hard to be right here and so far away.

Proliferative

And you hold your breath.

Somehow you think that will prevent you from crying. For some reason you think if you hold the air inside you can keep your emotions inside with it.

But it doesn’t really work. It just gives you a headache. And when your body can't absorb anymore, when you do finally cry, when you finally breathe again, whatever you swallowed has been absorbed by all your cells, and now its even harder because it's no longer something moving through you. It is now something that is a part of you.

Once it belongs to you, it remains.

In the end you face whatever it is that comes for you, be it light or darkness.

And this I can promise you. This one part, I can promise:
When it comes, you won’t be thinking about someone that cut you off in traffic. You won't be thinking about your boss or the coworker you've festered about. You won't be thinking about taxes or the mortgage, or a lie you told, or the 15 lbs you gained. You won’t be thinking about the inane things that you think about now.

You'll think about the moments you savored.

You'll think about the one whose smile made it all worth while.

Starting the Weekend with Words

“Oh come on! You just like her cuz she’s the same color as pancakes!”
- Joy Turner, My Name is Earl


“Stop throwing tiny dishes at me! You’re making a tiny mess!”
- Gary Barnes, Gary Unmarried


"An affair. It's so adult. It's like with stockings and martinis and William Holden."
- George Castanza, Seinfeld


“Man, I’m too busy to talk to myself.”
- Doug#1, Multiplicity


“I shoulda known somethin’ wasn’t right the second you walked into my life carrying that big bag-a crazy. ‘Cuz any woman with a purse that big has gotta have something wrong with her."
- Jason, True Blood


“I’m not yelling at you, I’m just yelling near you.”
- Rachel Green, Friends


“I’ve only had 2 electric shavers and they both turned my face black. They did! Why are you hysterical?”
- Husband


"Used the manly shaving cream husband left in the shower. Legs now smell like Cliff Robertson."
- frageelay


"Veronica I swear to Christ if I google this and I find this on that god damn blog of yours I will fucking kill you."
- Name Withheld


"John gets two hundered bucks every time he does me."
- Old Lady I know in Physical Therapy


"Looking for two honest men, Radar?"
- Hawkeye Pierce to Radar O'Reilly holding two lanterns, M*A*S*H


“I'm sure that in time, every bit of her will be gone, and her death will be a mystery, even to me.”
- Mort Rainey, Secret Window

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Vinyl Pressed & Perfect

I remember the day Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy was released.

I was 6, at home with Lori the babysitter. We sat outside on the stoop waiting for her boyfriend to come over with the album. They drank my parent’s liquor and blasted D’yer Maker on my folk’s old stereo. I laid on the floor with Lori and my dog, looking at the naked baby album art, listening to the music, in album order, over and over. I remember the feeling of being a part of it.

In 1979 I was in 7th grade and still living in Brooklyn. There were two record stores I could walk to: The Record Factory, and The Little Record Store. And, I mean “record” stores. Vinyl. 45’s, but mostly 33’s. Black Sabbath. Kiss. Angel. Sweet. T-Rex. Thin Lizzy. The Runaways. Jethro Tull. ELO. Yes. ELP. Sex Pistols.

I would go to those stores weekly and touch every album in those bins. I could start with the A’s and thumb through each record in the entire store ending with the Z’s. I knew every album that was out. I knew what bands were recording. We all did.

Back then you were so limited in the ways you could get music. There was such a profound feeling, a real experience, waiting for the vinyl to be released and getting to the store, and physically picking up the album you had waited for, the record you had to have. There was no mail order, or online ordering, or mp3’s, or free downloads, or Sirius radio or internet streaming feeds or eleven thousand MTV/VH1/Fuse stations, or satellite music on your TV. Yeah, you had a couple radio stations but they weren’t playing what you wanted to hear anyway.

You had albums and concerts. That was it. And my god when you got your hands on the “new” album by a band you loved you felt like you were one of the only people in the whole world to have this music, privy to the secret of it.

Back then you ran home and you went in your room, and you closed the door. You pulled that new crisp back vinyl album out of its cardboard sleeve, and you put it on the turntable. Then, you sat still. You listened. The music had all of your attention. You stared at the album cover. You read the liner notes. You read along with the lyrics if they were printed. You listened to it over and over. All the way through. From beginning to end. In order, just as the artists intended. You didn’t skip the songs you weren’t too thrilled with. You digested the concept the way the band wanted you to. The way it was meant to be.

The album was an entity all its own.

In 1982 I was 15 years old, living in Pennsylvania. Adam and the Ants - Kings of the Wild Frontier. Asia self titled. Rush - Signals. Blue Oyster Cult - Fire of Unknown Origin. Ramones - End of the Century. Judas Priest - Screaming for Vengeance. The Clash - Combat Rock. Joan Jett & the Blackhearts. Icehouse. Queen. David Bowie. Ultravox. Alice Cooper. Boston. Depeche Mode. AC/DC. Blondie. I can still name songs by saying phrases like “fourth song second side.” I can still recite the liner notes and tell you about the cover art. I can name the musicians. I can give you the date of releasment and the store where I bought it. I can still remember where the skips were from being overplayed.

There weren’t a million bands making their own genres and releasing independent recordings. When a band got signed back then, it was a big deal. If you weren’t signed, you couldn’t get your music out there. It meant something. And there weren’t 200 different categories from Ska to Emo. There was rock. That was pretty much it. Punk, hard rock, corporate... But it was all together. You had some different flavors, but it was all pretty much rock. And you knew these bands. There was a long period of time where you could actually know pretty much every single recording artist that was out there.

I’m not complaining. I have 130 gigs of music. I love going into I-tunes and buying a song I heard on Area 38 Sirius radio, picking the mix I prefer, and then seeing what people who bought that song also bought. I love independent music. I love the choices and possibilities.

But I miss that feeling of discovery and knowing. I miss The Little Record Store on 86th and 5th in Bay Ridge Brooklyn. I miss Led Zeppelin.


“I want to dedicate it
Every body made it
Infiltrate it
Activate it.”
- Pop Music, by M




Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich - Hold Tight
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All Along

In the early 1990's I had a 3 railroad-room apartment about twenty minutes into New Jersey from Manhattan. 15 years ago. Old fashioned answering machine. No cell phone back then, kids. Not even voicemail. I mean, a real tangible answering machine. Like the one Bridget Fonda had in Singles. Every morning I would record a new outgoing message. It was always just a quote, the "Quote of the Day." If you called my number and got my machine, you didn't get some contrived "This is me, wait for the beep," bullshit. Instead you’d hear:

I became a fabulous opera. I saw that everyone in the world was doomed to happiness. Action isn't life; it's merely a way of ruining a kind of strength, a means of destroying nerves. Morality is water on the brain. - Arthur Rimbaud.

Or

Levon is a doo doo head. - Thomas Harris

Or

Down in the pleasure center, hell bent or heaven sent. Listen to the propaganda, listen to the latest slander. There's nothing underhand that she wouldn't understand. - Elvis Costello

Beep. That was it. Sometimes it was a lyric, sometimes a famous quote. Sometimes it was graffitti, or something I wrote, or something a passer-by said that I overheard. Words are everywhere. And I wanted to know them. I wanted to share them.

And every day people would call my machine just to hear the quote of the day. Sometimes people would leave messages. Some would ask if I took requests and could we hear something from The Beatles. Some would say they liked the quote or that they had never understood the lyrics until now. And some would simply ask if I wanted to change my long distance carrier.

I did Spoken Word performances. Long before Slam, long before everyone did it, long before there would be a line up of people. There would be venues, clubs in the city, that were dark and cracked, and I would be one of only maybe 3 Spoken Word artists booked for a single night. All content original. All applause, and all jeers, very clear.

I also had a fax machine: an old - thermal paper - chirping like a wounded seagull - Office Space - fax machine. When the New York Rangers played, I would type up a thing I called “Game Night” and fax it to everyone who’d submitted fax numbers to me to receive this game night flyer. On it I’d have all the details. +/-, points, and penalty stats. The roster for the Rangers: who was playing, who was injured. Who was up from the farm. Same for the other team. Who the refs would be. Place and time of face off. And I’d always put a few little notes of interest like –

Tonight we’ll see cheap-shot king Dale Hunter for the first time since the Turgeon incident.

Or

Ron Hextall in net, a player so fierce he actually won the Conn Smythe in ’87, even though his team lost The Cup to the Oilers. Now that’s impressive.

I would get a fax back sometimes asking for additional stats or why someone wasn't on the second line anymore. There was communication. It was begging to happen.

The answering machine, the microphone, and the fax machine were all we really had back then. This was before everyone had a webpage. This was before email and cell phones. Before weblogs and texting. Before Myspace and Fuckfacebook and Twitter and podcasts. This was before everything.

In a way, wasn't I blogging? In a way, in another dimension, I think I've been blogging for 17 years at least. I was getting it out there. And some people even responded. I just didn't have the internet. I couldn't moderate comments, and update feeds. But I was blogging, wasn't I?

Were we all natural born bloggers? Even the most over sensitive and protective writers among us, were we all finding ways to get Words of some sort out there, all this time? Have we all changed as writers because of it?

Did we invent the blog? Or did it invent us?




“And I do believe in ghosts. I do believe in ghosts.”
- The Cowardly Lion, The Wizard of Oz

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